The Pen You Need to Have - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

For the last few weeks I have been in charge of promoting a product for Videopro, a client of ours who we built and manage a ecommerce website for that sells audio visual and computer solutions.  The product I am talking about is the Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smart Pen.

In the beginning, my initial thoughts were that the price tag on the Livescribe Smart Pen was incredibly high for a pen, that was until I learnt a bit more about it. Because I was in charge of promoting the pen, like any good salesman you need to know a bit about what you are promoting, and so began reading into the features. I found a promotional video on youtube and after watching the video I instantly became interested. I convinced my boss to order one for the office and now we use it for all of our meetings.

The pen is pretty much a microcomputer that allows you to record while you are writing, so that you can listen to what you were hearing at the time of writing the notes. What it also does is link what you were writing to what you were hearing, so when you are revising your notes after your meeting, you can listen to what you were hearing when you were writing a particular sentence, so if that sentence doesn’t make sense or was written to messily, no problem, you can hear what was being said at the time.

The pen also has the ability to be plugged into your PC. After a meeting I can plug it into my computer which backs up my notes, and displays them as if I typed them onto the computer. There is also a search feature that allows me to search for a keyword that I wrote when writing my notes. You have to admit that is pretty handy!

The pen software will run both on Windows and Mac, and is something I definitely recommend for anyone who takes notes regularly. Even for someone is is perfect at taking notes, there are always times when your notes in sections are not so clear.

If you have not heard of them or shopped with them before, Big Brown Box are a relatively new online shopping website that sell a range of products online. Big Brown Box popped up almost a year ago now and most will agree that the their website is not badly designed at all. Its graphic design is done well, and the rest of the features are also well designed.

One thing we have noticed with Big Brown Box is the frequency that the website is down for maintenance. It seems that quite often this is the case, and in most cases it is for extended periods of time, on busy days. From experience weekdays, in particular those days early in the week are the most busy times for a shopping website, and in many cases these are the times when Big Brown Box is down for maintenance. As web developers we know that any website at times needs to be shut down for maintenance, but at two o’clock on a Sunday morning there is going to be a lot less traffic and is a much better time to do it then midday on a Monday.

Now it could well be the case that these frequent maintenance screens are not planned and are instead problems with the site, which even in a perfect world can happen. In this event what Big Brown Box really should be doing is offering a discount to the user – if the user is interrupted when trying to shop on your website, displaying a discount coupon on the screen they could use during their next purchase would help ensure they come back, and don’t purchase off one of your competitors.

Another thing which we noticed during these down periods was the fact that they had not paused their Google AdWords campaigns. We imagine that the Big Brown Box AdWords campaign is quite large so it would be sensible during these times to pause the campaign until the website is back up. This is good advice for any business owners running a online store, during down time ensure that any paid advertising is switched off as this can save you a great deal of money, and ensure that as little people as possible see your website off-line.